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Attorney General Eric Holder said Tuesday that he's ordered a Justice Department probe into an IRS program that singled out Tea Party and other conservative groups for additional scrutiny in their applications for tax-exempt status.

Holder announced the investigation during a press conference in Washington. He said the FBI was coordinating with the Department of Justice to see if any laws were broken. He called the practice "outrageous and unacceptable," echoing remarks from President Obama a day earlier.

The probe comes as newly obtained documents show the current IRS chief knew about the agency's targeting of Tea Party groups as early as May 2012 and other officials in Washington were clued in more than a year before that.

The additional details were provided in a timeline from the office of Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, based on briefings by the inspector general's office investigating the case. Together, they challenged the agency's initial claims that the practice of flagging conservative groups for additional scrutiny was contained to low-level staffers at a Cincinnati office.

The timeline shows that Steven Miller, the acting IRS chief who at the time was a deputy commissioner, was briefed on the practice on May 3, 2012. Despite this briefing, Miller wrote letters to members of Congress at least twice to explain the process of reviewing applications for tax-exempt status without disclosing that Tea Party groups had been targeted. On July 25, 2012, Miller testified before the House Ways and Means oversight subcommittee, but again did not mention the additional scrutiny -- despite being asked about it.

"It is almost inconceivable to imagine that top officials at the IRS knew conservative groups were being targeted but chose to willfully mislead the Committee's investigation into this practice," he said in a statement.

Further, the timeline shows that managers, after compiling a list of Tea Party and other cases, decided to send their report "up the chain in Washington" in April 2010. The timeline says this report was shared with two executives in Washington, including Lois G. Lerner. Lerner heads the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt organizations and is the official who first revealed the controversial practice on Friday.

The timeline suggests she knew about the practice even earlier than previously thought. Further, it suggests other Washington officials were aware early on. Meanwhile, The Washington Post reported that IRS officials at the D.C. headquarters were sending inquiries to conservative groups on their donors, and in at least one case an application came under review in Washington.

Miller's actions are sure to come under increased scrutiny.

At the June hearing, Rep. Kenny Marchant, R-Texas, told Miller that some politically active tax-exempt groups in his district had complained about being harassed. Marchant did not explicitly ask if tea party groups were being targeted. But he did ask how applications were handled.

Miller responded, "We did group those organizations together to ensure consistency, to ensure quality. We continue to work those cases," according to a transcript on the committee's website.

Earlier, Rep. Charles Boustany, R-La., had raised concerns with the IRS about complaints that tea party groups were being harassed. Boustany specifically mentioned tea party groups in his inquiry.

But in a June 15, 2012, letter to Boustany, Miller said that when the IRS saw an increase in applications from groups that were involved in political activity, the agency "took steps to coordinate the handling of the case to ensure consistency."

He added that agents worked with tax law experts "to develop approaches and materials that could be helpful to the agents working the cases."

Miller did not mention that in 2011, those materials included a list of words to watch for, such as "tea party" and "patriot." He also didn't disclose that in January 2012, the criteria for additional screening was updated to include references to the Constitution or the Bill of Rights.

The House Ways and Means Committee, chaired by Camp, is holding a hearing on the issue Friday and Miller is scheduled to testify.

The Senate Finance Committee announced Monday that it will join a growing list of congressional committees investigating the matter.

The IRS apologized Friday for what it acknowledged was "inappropriate" targeting of conservative political groups during the 2012 election to see whether they were violating their tax-exempt status. In some cases, the IRS acknowledged, agents inappropriately asked for lists of donors.

The agency blamed low-level employees in a Cincinnati office, saying no high-level officials were aware.

When members of Congress repeatedly raised concerns with the IRS about complaints that tea party groups were being harassed last year, a deputy IRS commissioner took the lead in assuring lawmakers that the additional scrutiny was a legitimate part of the screening process.

That deputy commissioner was Miller, who is now the acting head of the agency.

Camp and other members of the Ways and Means Committee sent at least four inquiries to the IRS, starting in June 2011. Hatch, the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, sent three inquiries. And Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., chairman of the House oversight committee, sent at least one.

"This was a targeting of the president's political enemies, effectively, and lies about it during the election year so that it wasn't discovered until afterwards," Issa said Tuesday on "CBS This Morning." The fact is this is the kind of investigation that has to be open and transparent to the American people."

None of the responses they received from the IRS acknowledged that conservative groups had ever been targeted, including a response to Hatch dated Sept. 11, 2012 -- four months after Miller had been briefed.

In several letters to members of Congress, Miller went into painstaking detail about how applications for tax-exempt status were screened. But he never mentioned that conservative groups were being targeted, even though people working under him knew as early as June 2011 that tea party groups were being targeted, according to an upcoming report by the agency's inspector general.

The IRS issued a statement Monday saying that Miller had been briefed on May 3, 2012 "that some specific applications were improperly identified by name and sent to the (exempt organizations) centralized processing unit for further review." That was the unit in Cincinnati that handled the tea party applications.

When Lerner responded to inquiries from the House oversight committee, she also didn't mention the fact that tea party groups had ever been targeted. Her responses included 45-page letters in May 2012 to Issa and to Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, who chairs a subcommittee.

“They have the guns and therefore we are for peace and for reformation through the ballot. When we have the guns then it will be through the bullet.” - Saul Alinsky, quoting Lenin

“I wanted [Jimmy] Carter in and I wanted [Ford] out,” comedian Chevy Chase would later admit of his mocking Ford impersonation on "Saturday Night Live", “and I figured look, we're reaching millions of people every weekend, why not do it."

You can't have a politically biased entity investigate another entity looking to bust them for having the same bias. That's like checking yourself out for personality flaws

__________________

“They have the guns and therefore we are for peace and for reformation through the ballot. When we have the guns then it will be through the bullet.” - Saul Alinsky, quoting Lenin

“I wanted [Jimmy] Carter in and I wanted [Ford] out,” comedian Chevy Chase would later admit of his mocking Ford impersonation on "Saturday Night Live", “and I figured look, we're reaching millions of people every weekend, why not do it."

You can't have a politically biased entity investigate another entity looking to bust them for having the same bias. That's like checking yourself out for personality flaws

So then who do your propose other than the FBI?

Also, Directors of the FBI serve over several administrations. The current sitting one, Director Mueller, was appointed by Bush in 2001 and is still in office. I think they have a 10 year cap (current one was waived for Mueller by the Senate). Not really a conflict of interests there.

The maelstrom over the revelation that the IRS targeted anti-tax Tea Party groups applying for tax exempt status for scrutiny is showing no signs of slowing down, with Republicans seeing their chance to milk a scandal for political purposes. But while the politics is heating up, some important context is emerging, like the fact that liberal groups were targeted as well, and in fact the only group to have its application denied was a liberal group.

One of those groups, Emerge America, saw its tax-exempt status denied, forcing it to disclose its donors and pay some taxes. None of the Republican groups have said their applications were rejected.

Progress Texas, another of the organizations, faced the same lines of questioning as the Tea Party groups from the same IRS office that issued letters to the Republican-friendly applicants. A third group, Clean Elections Texas, which supports public funding of campaigns, also received IRS inquiries.

The IRS released a statement late Tuesday admitting that it had pooled together the applications of groups that were politically active, and incorrectly used the names of some of the groups—a "minority" of them—as the basis for targeting them. Which, David Cay Johnston at the Columbia Journalism Review reminds readers is the IRS's job.

Missing from much coverage is the relevant recent history—the role of the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision and how it prompted a deluge of requests from new organizations seeking tax-exempt status under tax code Section 501(c)(4) as “social welfare” organizations—despite the fact that many of these are blatantly political operations.

Congress requires the IRS to review every application for tax-exempt status to weed out organizations that are partisan, political, or that generate private gain. Congress has imposed this requirement on the IRS, and its predecessor agencies, since 1913.

Those are just two of the salient points Johnston makes to give the critical context behind this scandal. He also points out that the IRS is tasked with the vague and mushy directive to distinguish between groups are "primarily engaged" in politics versus those that are primarily engaged in "social welfare," and getting to that distinction is a challenge for an agency deluged by applications post-Citizens United and which has had its budget slashed by 17 percent per capita in the last decade. The agency processed 2,774 501(c)(4) applications in 2012.

The other point he makes, which we're not hearing frequently or loudly enough in the response to the kerfuffle, is a real scandal: "the social welfare tax exemption is being used by existing 501(c)(4) organizations, including some very large ones, to promote partisan political interests—the very activity Congress has explicitly prohibited for a century." In other words, Karl Rove and Crossroads.

This is a serious issue, one deserving of investigation. But Republicans could be biting off more than they can chew if it causes a bright light to be shone on how politically partisan organizations, like Rove's, are exploiting the law.

Obama just came out and reiterated how seriously this is and how he will not tolerate it, so I guess its a big deal to him...too bad you guys are still using the old Obama "meh, this isn't anything" fallback.

__________________

“They have the guns and therefore we are for peace and for reformation through the ballot. When we have the guns then it will be through the bullet.” - Saul Alinsky, quoting Lenin

“I wanted [Jimmy] Carter in and I wanted [Ford] out,” comedian Chevy Chase would later admit of his mocking Ford impersonation on "Saturday Night Live", “and I figured look, we're reaching millions of people every weekend, why not do it."

Obama just came out and reiterated how seriously this is and how he will not tolerate it, so I guess its a big deal to him...too bad you guys are still using the old Obama "meh, this isn't anything" fallback.

As opposed to you and your conservative brethren blaming him for this?